Today's the day

[SonicTramp]

Hi,
Thank you MikeJ for such a comprehensive critique. I appreciate your time. Your post taught me a few things.

Well, back to grind. So I moved my monitors about 3 feet away from the wall. They were about 1 1/2 feet, too close, the pros say. I moved my R one to about the same distance from the side wall (3 ft). The L one is in the middle, so I let it be. Built the stands for the monitors (2 4X4 cut to height and a couple of screws) nice and solid now. They were sitting on top of the boxes they came in with. What a great way for a monitor to sit on, a hollow closed ends paper box that would resonate with any sound. But in my defense, I did have a thin sheet of scratch-resistant packing material for it to sit on for sound treatment purposes. No wonder why I hear the low end coming from the Heaven, Hell, and somewhere in between. Sometimes I even thought I heard my gf's voice in the mix. With the new stands my monitors sit perfectly to my ear level with the tweeters right at the entrance of my ear canals. They were about 4 inches lower than my ears previously. I can hear the hi mid and the top end much better now, almost as clear as my gf when she is yelling at me for leaving tools "all over" the places. I argued that only a person with a heart of stone can say that, for I was doing it in the name of... music. Didn't quite shut her up, but the volume seemed to quiet down a few decibels. But I digress.

I proceed to mix as I usually do, and, yeah, I don't mix loud either, around 60-65 dBs, sometimes to 70 but never 80. No need to wake up the dragon. And yeah, I read about the monitors positions and understand the concept. The position now is adequate. No, I don't use a lot of plug ins. I have enough problems with just an EQ and a compressor, none of which I am good at. So yeah, just EQ, compressor, and saturation/distortion/amp and mostly stock plug ins. The only fancy ones I got is the Waves Renaissance bundle and out of those I only use the compressor and reverb. I don't pay attention to plug ins that much for now. I work on my hearing first. I work on balancing. And I work on my confidence. Plug ins are icing on the cake, but first we have to bake a cake, right?

Sometimes not too long ago, in the quest to enhance my knowledge and techniques in mixing music I ran into an article titled "Aggregation of marginal improvement" from some manager for a racing bicycle team in England. You can google it to find out more. Very interesting technique. The gist of it is: you make a minute improvement in EVERY (key word) aspect of your work, even just 1%/day, and in a short amount of time the total improvement will be significant. This idea can be applied to almost anything. I thought I share it with you as a return of a favor .

What I am doing now is to put the theory to the test. I hope it will work. Thanks for reaching out.

This is the very first mix after. Let me know what you think if you have time. Thanks